Robust Wireless Network Coding - An Overview

Network Coding (NC) has witnessed a tremendous upsurge in interest and activities in recent years, both in academia and industry. Indeed, since the pioneering publication of Ahlswede et al. in 2000, NC has rapidly emerged as a major research area in information theory due to its wide applicability to communication through real networks. The many contributions available in the literature to date, ranging from purely theoretical studies on fundamental limits to practical experimentations in real–world environments, offer a clear evidence that the shift in paradigm envisaged by NC might revolutionize the way we manage, operate, and understand the organization of networks. However, the principle of NC is not without its limitations. Initial studies on NC were mainly focused on lossless channels, which, however, might have limited applicability to a wireless context. As a matter of fact, in practical wireless environments, NC might be very susceptible to transmission errors caused by noise, fading, or interference. In particular, the algebraic operations accomplished by the intermediate nodes of the network introduce some packet dependencies in a way that the injection of even a single erroneous packet has the potential to corrupt every packet received by the destination nodes. Motivated by this consideration, recent research efforts have been devoted to the design of robust NC, with the main goal to circumvent the critical limitations of the NC paradigm in practical operating environments. In this paper, we aim at providing an overview of the most important and notable research directions in this emerging field.